


star-crossed

by miss_butterfly_soup



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst, Ficlet, Fluff, M/M, One Shot, Sad with a Happy Ending, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24201880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_butterfly_soup/pseuds/miss_butterfly_soup
Summary: Nightvale is a hard place to love, but Carlos stays. Sometimes, he's not sure why.
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	star-crossed

It is a starry night in Nightvale. It’s rare- no swirling clouds or blinding lights. There are no listeners, no Pilot, no corporations. It’s the kind of thing Carlos used to take for granted. On sleepless nights in the city, he’d take a blanket to the roof and think about what it must be like to love. To be loved. He still misses it, sometimes. He wonders what could have been when it feels like his work is worthless in a town rooted in abnormality, when it feels like the world is ending for the fiftieth time that month, when he wakes up in the middle of the night on a lab cot for days on end because of the things he has seen. He still is learning to handle it all, how to normalize death and decay and destruction as parts of his day and not tragedies to be mourned and saved. Nightvale is a hard place to love.

But Carlos stays. He stays for Cecil. Maybe it’s foolish, but still he stays, because Cecil is here. Cecil is the town, its oddities and imperfections, and yet he is perfect. Carlos knows that Cecil doesn’t know that, sees how he flinches away from the bathroom mirror, how he never knew his eyes had turned violet until he had somebody to see them for him. Carlos knows that even if Cecil could see himself, he wouldn’t see himself the way Carlos sees him- as perfection incarnate.

He always thought love was supposed to be easier. Maybe that is their own doing, but it is still true that when the radio show runs late and Carlos is alone, he thinks about how he was hard to love- how he still is. How Cecil, who has his heart in full, is so connected to this little desert town that his heart beats in time with the airplane signals on the radio tower, and how Carlos does not know how to live in a place his heart can never truly leave, an outside observer by trade. He knows that the joy his heart is filled with cannot last, that when Carlos withers away with age or when Cecil is killed in another Nightvale day, one will be left behind with an aching heart and burning memories. He knows that they are star-crossed to the highest degree, and that a day will someday be their last together. He doesn’t always know if it’s worth it. If it would be easier to end the grant, go back to a place he grew out of calling home, and forget the arid little town where he first knew what it was to fall out of love with the idea of love and fall in love with the love itself.

Those thoughts never stay. If there’s one thing that all the books and movies and songs got right, it’s that love never feels wrong, or not worth the struggle when you’re with the person you love. In the moment, it always feels overwhelming, and worth anything in the world for that moment to last a lifetime. Maybe it is worth it, Carlos thinks. At this moment, it all feels perfect and infinite, and beautiful. Cecil is curled up in his arms, half-asleep in their little nest of blankets. The stars are so clear out here in the desert night’s chill, and he knows what it is to finally feel his heart brimming with love. He knows that it cannot, and will not last. They will go inside when the last of the warmth seeps from their bones, that Carlos’s research grant cannot last him forever, that he cannot stay and Cecil cannot go. But they have this moment- can’t that be enough?

**Author's Note:**

> cross-posted on tumblr/  
> sorry if i seem awkward or smth, it's my first fic. ever.  
> also it might be ooc bc i've listened to maybe 6 episodes of wtnv.


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